I recently travelled to South Africa to present the keynotes at our Informatica Data Disruption Roundtable events in Johannesburg and Cape Town and meet with customers. Since it was my first visit to Africa, it was an eye-opening experience. The striking beauty of the wildlife and scenery in Cape Town combined with the contrasts of wealth and poverty made lasting impressions on me. What most impressed me were the people. The energy, warmth and openness of the people I met and their enthusiasm for building the future were tangible. I made a point of engaging with everyone I encountered and heard many heartwarming and heartbreaking stories about people and companies’ efforts to create a better future.
Our round table events and my conversations with some of the leaders in South African banking, telecommunications and industry provided an interesting window into how people are thinking about digital transformation in the South African context. I found that the challenge of finding better ways to harness data to fuel digital transformation is global.
You can check out the video here ‘Informatica Data Disruption Roundtable 2017 – South Africa‘
The companies I met were optimistic about the future and are investing heavily in transforming their businesses to create new opportunities and improve competitiveness by better leveraging data. Every company I spoke with was thinking hard about the future and embracing change. Many of them were already on their journeys and realized that data was the key to their success. As the lead product marketer for our Data Integration Hub (DIH) product, I was also personally delighted to get positive reactions to DIH from the companies I had the opportunity to speak with. I look forward to many future success stories from this region!
I found the results of a recent Gartner survey in South Africa highlighted in this article to align with what I heard: Digital business has created a different mindset for more than three quarters of CIOs in Africa.
The companies I spoke with were all moving forward with initial implementations or were planning how to build out the infrastructure to support their data-driven digital transformations. They all saw data as crucial to digital transformation success and were striving to make data into corporate assets that they can more easily leverage and govern. There was tremendous interest in leveraging IoT data from industrial plants, consumer devices, cars and retail locations to better understand customers and their businesses, as well as to build new services. Coming from Silicon Valley, this all sounded very familiar to me.
Change is happening everywhere, across the globe, and the future belongs to those that have the foresight and courage to forge ahead with their own intelligent disruptions.
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